1 90 A WHITE-PAPER GARDEN 



blossoms which ministers to the primal acquisi- 

 tiveness of their race. A garden however 

 means restrictions and limitations, scorned by 

 boys, but accepted by little girls as a part of 

 the eternal feminine. 



If any proper garden such as everybody's 

 grandmothers and aunts used to love, the 

 whole summer was none too long for the things 

 small hands found to do. There was a tree, 

 always a tree, there, with low-hanging branches, 

 under which the little women kept house, and 

 there they lived that mimic life which, to such 

 little women, is so absorbing and so real. Bits 

 of gaily painted crockery were hoarded there, 

 and perhaps some fragments of a broken mirror. 

 Some snail shells, some bits of quartz, or 

 lichened rock, some sods of dark green moss 

 that was all, except the imagination, that con- 

 verted these properties into an adequate setting 

 for whatever game might be in hand 



" A wedding or a festival, 

 A mourning or a funeral." 



" If there are no games, what is left? " cries 

 Tolstoy, but there are games in plenty. Violets 

 are turned into soldiers or duellists by inter- 

 locking their heads, and having a tug-o'-war 



